"
These lines must have been composed some years after the event, inasmuch
as the men were hanged on May 6th, 1685, and the patent of Claverhouse's
peerage bears the date November 12th, 1688. This proves, what indeed few
people can have doubted, that the damning testimony of "The Cloud of
Witnesses" wants at least the weight of contemporary evidence. An
authority, however, for this particular epitaph can be traced back to
1690, when Alexander Shields published his martyrology.[60] "The said
Claverhouse," he wrote, "together with the Earl of Dumbarton and
Lieut.-General Douglas, caused Peter Gillies, John Bryce, Thomas Young
(who was taken by the Laird of Lee), William Fiddisone, and John
Buiening to be put to death upon a gibbet, without legal trial or
sentence, suffering them neither to have a Bible nor to pray before they
died."[61] Defoe has evidently followed Shields;[62] but Walker, though
he quotes the aforesaid epitaph, does not himself implicate
Claverhouse.
Wodrow does not appear to have heard any of these stories. He names only
Gillies and Bryce, quoting from the indictment, which does not specify
the other sufferers, to show that the men were tried before General
Drummond and a tribunal of fifteen soldiers on May 5th, and hanged on
the following day. We have already seen that a few days previously
Claverhouse had sent a prisoner for trial to this same General Drummond,
because he had himself at that time no commission to try prisoners.
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